Very many users of the Internet have only dial-up access through a local ISP (Internet Access Provider). Typically a dial-up user will be dynamically assigned a network address at each connection from a pool of available addresses kept by the user's ISP, the assigned address only being valid for the current connection and then being returned to the address pool. This arrangement presents certain difficulties when two such dial-up access users wish to communicate directly with each other over the internet as some means must be found of informing each other of their current network addresses. One known solution is to arrange for a user to register their current address at a meeting point (a service system) on the internet enabling gother users to go to that point and find out the current address of the first-mentioned user.
Another difficulty faced by a dial-up access internet user when seeking to contact anther such user is that the latter will frequently not be currently connected to the internet. The target user therefore needs to be woken up—one way of doing this is, of course, simply to call the target user over the telephone requesting that the user connects to the internet. The concept of wakeup calls for waking up communication equipment is well known; an example of use of a wakeup call to prompt communication initiation, is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,434,911 in relation to the remote reading of a utility meter by the utility company. The meter is connected to a normal telephone line and the utility company can wake up the meter by making a call to that line and allowing it to ring 16 times; the meter recognises such a call as an instruction to send a meter reading to the utility company and this it does by calling back the utility company at a predetermined time and transmitting the required data.
It is also known to remotely wakeup a computer to initiate the set up of IP-based (Internet Protocol based) communication with it. In this case, the computer is connected to a dedicated telephone line via a modem. A user wishing to wake up the computer calls the computer and upon the latter answering, hangs up. The computer now calls a local internet access provider (IAP) and establishes a connection to the Internet. Next, the computer sends an e-mail to the user at a fixed EP address; this e-mail will contain the current IP address dynamically assigned to the computer by the IAP thereby enabling the user to send messages back to the computer. In a refinement, caller ID information is provided to the computer with the initial call and this information is used to determine which of several fixed IP addresses is called back by the computer.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a communications arrangement and method in which a service system facilitates the establishment of communication between two end users by providing both wake-up and address communication functions.